Word: reader
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This is a parable about language and about abstraction. For an instant Calvino confronts the reader with an impossibility--a notion of distinctness apart from any form or reality to be distinguished--which is a familiar part of language as a system of abstractions from the world. At the same time, it is a parable about distinctness itself, based on another impossibility: a total negation of distinctness. "But why, then," Marco Polo asks, "does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves...
...interlunations, of course, remain-Adams' "shadows." But those aside, Jefferson possessed a resplendently Baconian intellect, a mind with all its windows open. The scope and subtlety of that mind is on full view in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, a superb collection of his letters and public writings. The reader can begin almost anywhere in the book and come away refreshed. Perhaps the best starting point is Jefferson's stately, passionate argument for independence: a declaration that issues from a ripe philosophical vision of the natural rights of man. His Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom begins with resonances that...
...spite of herself, the biographer has succeeded. She has written one of those windy, overweight Southern books -the Gone With the Wind syndrome -that can do everything wrong except bore the reader. For seven indefatigable years she has tracked her subject: to New York City, where Carson lived in a household that included W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Richard Wright, among others; to the obligatory artists' colonies (Yaddo, Bread Loaf); even to London and Paris. Early on, she grabs her fey and monstrous main character by the toe and never lets go. The ghost of McCullers does the rest...
Ultimately, Amnesty aims at the same area of the American consciousness as those ads in the New Yorker which inform the reader that you-can-save-Jose-for-$15-a-month-or-turn-the-page. As White notes, "once you adopt a prisoner, the relationship weighs so heavily on your conscience that you feel personally responsible for his welfare." She adds that "this is why Amnesty works so well--it makes the members feel so concerned and successful with what they are doing...
...next 20 years, Doctorow fought the blank page-and won four times. Between novels he was a reservations clerk for American Airlines, a reader for CBS, Ian Fleming's editor at New American Library, Norman Mailer's editor at Dial Press, and most recently a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College...